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[by the artist, June 2009]: On my Facebook profile I declared to the world that Bach's celebrated Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-1051) were my favorite pieces of music. Here they are visualized in six panels one for each concerto, strarting top left and going left to right, the 4th being on the bottom left. Again I used the resist method to draw white lines while listening to each concerto once. Then I listened to the music again to apply the colored washes. Using Bach's own words in dedicating these pieces, I apologize for the meagre technical means I used to make this painting: " begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste..."
Ever since I heard them in the early sixties and made my short film of colors pulsating to a passage of one of these concertos, this music has been a sure tonic for me to uplift, excite, console, and inspire.
My favourite of the suite is the sixth and last (bottom right). In the first movement I drew 'wild' lines all over the square and thought of Jackson Pollock. I had not appreciated the importance of his 'action painting' in relation to visual music until recently, when I saw the epynomous movie about him. Here was real-time color-shape-movement. With this Bach I started drawing a pattern of white lines reminiscent of Lissajous figures - 'baroque' harmonic criss-crossing mathematical curves such as seen on an oscillescope. For the 2nd and 3d movements I used a finer nib to embellish what I had drawn so spontaneously. An odd thought struck me that this polyphonic, vibrant, lucid, relentlessly inventive and deeply moving music could well be a symbolic distillation of all of human emotions, scientific ideas and artistic constructs... experienced simeltaneously! |
